Video compression and decompression techniques, as well as different display standards, are utilized by conventional video processing systems, such as portable video communication devices, during recording, transmission, storage, and playback of video information. For example, quarter common intermediate format (QCIF) may be utilized for playback and recording of video information, such as videoconferencing, utilizing portable video communication devices, for example, portable video telephone devices. The QCIF format is an option provided by the ITU-T's H.261 standard for videoconferencing codes. It produces a color image of 144 non-interlaced luminance lines, each containing 176 pixels. The frame rate for videoconferencing may be up to 15 frames per second (fps). QCIF provides approximately one quarter the resolution of the common intermediate format (CIF) with resolution of 288 luminance (Y) lines each containing 352 pixels.
Conventional video processing systems for portable video communication devices, such as video processing systems implementing the QCIF format, utilize video encoding and decoding techniques to compress video information during transmission, or for storage, and to decompress elementary video data prior to communicating the video data to a display. The video compression and decompression (CODEC) techniques, such as variable length coding (VLC), discrete cosine transformation (DCT), quantization, and/or motion estimation, in conventional video processing systems for portable video communication devices utilize a significant part of the computing and memory resources of a general purpose central processing unit (CPU) of a microprocessor, or other embedded processor, for computation-intensive tasks and data transfers during encoding and/or decoding of video data. The general purpose CPU, however, handles other real-time processing tasks, such as communication with other modules within a video processing network during a video teleconference utilizing the portable video communication devices, for example. The increased amount of computation-intensive video processing tasks and data transfer tasks executed by the CPU and/or other processor, in a conventional QCIF video processing system results in a significant decrease in the video quality that the CPU or processor may provide within the video processing network.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.